"Frost" Attack Unlocks Android Phones' Data By Chilling Their Memory In A FreezerResearchers at Germany's Erlangen University have found that a cold boot attack known as FROST (Forensic Recovery of Scrambled Telephones) can allow a hacker to read data off a smartphone's RAM by chilling it to five degrees Fahrenheit and quickly rebooting it. The technique exploits RAM's remanence, or its propensity to retain information for a few moments after power is removed—cooling it beforehand causes the information to linger longer, giving a hacker or forensic scientist enough time to access its memory. The experiment was run on a Galaxy Nexus running the latest version of Android, and it is unknown how well it would work on iOS, but the only way to really prevent this kind of attack is by powering down your phone before it leaves your possession. [Forbes]

EU Privacy Regulators Take Aim at Google Privacy PolicyEuropean Union data protection authorities stated today that they plan to take action against Google for their consolidated privacy policy that collects anonymous user data across all of its services. French regulator CNIL has stated that they will set up further inquiry into Google after Google's "high risk" data bundling practices were brought into question last October and have not been addressed. Google has stated that they responded to CNIL on January 8th and will continue to do so, noting that their privacy policy respects European Law. [Reuters]